


And Do Not Trust Too Much Your Eyes

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 02:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4461626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lila Barton knows that Auntie Nat is a good person, whatever she has done in the past: and she also knows that other people on Auntie Nat’s team can probably relate, in one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Do Not Trust Too Much Your Eyes

…

The spider web looks like one of those dead-end figures in a cat’s cradle string game, the kind you cannot rearrange into any other shapes. Sunlight from the hayloft makes its threads vanish or reappear between the two crossbeams, depending on which way Lila tilts her head. A little sulfur butterfly, its yellow body a dried-out husk, hangs suspended at the web’s center.

The black widow spider herself scrambles around an empty jam jar.

“And that spot of red, on its stomach? The thing shaped like an hourglass?” Daddy turns the jar sideways for Lila to see. The spider’s legs remind her of the spinning teeth on a wheel rake. “That’s the best way to recognize them, but you usually don’t want to be that close.”

“Oh, it can’t hurt me,” Lila states. “It’s too small.”

Daddy crouches down in front of her, resting back on his heels to stay balanced. He smells like motor oil and fresh straw. 

“Yeah, but they’re venomous. That means they’ve, uh, they’ve got this bad thing inside them, but if they bite you then that bad thing can get inside you, too.”

“And what happens? Will I have spider eggs in my brain? Do they come out my ears when they hatch?” A marvelous possibility occurs to her. “If I’m bitten by a butterfly instead, can I get superpowers?”

“What?” He frowns. “Wait, let me guess. Cooper told you that one?”

(After they determine that this would not be a medical feasibility, Daddy lets the spider go. Lila supervises. But how come the spider doesn’t die from its own poison? Or venom? What’s the difference between venom and poison, anyway?) 

This is part of an education every farm child must receive, along with the fact that copperhead snakes look like fallen autumn leaves and nightshade looks likes ripened blueberries; she learns further that black widow spiders are shy, that black widow spiders want you to leave them alone, that they have a penchant for hiding in cellars and wood sheds and the warm darkness of little boots tossed aside in the mudroom.

Lila, naturally, has a hard time fitting all this information into her idea of Auntie Nat.

Auntie Nat is different from other people’s aunts. You are supposed to call someone ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ because they are your mommy’s sister, or your daddy’s brother, or if they are married to such people, although these prerequisites seems limiting in Lila’s opinion. What if you don’t like your siblings and want new ones?

(Mere philosophical conjecture, of course. Cooper is tolerable enough, although given the chance Lila would probably trade him for a pony.)

But instead Daddy chose Auntie Nat – this is how Mommy has explained it – to be a member of their family. She is Daddy’s friend. She helps keep him safe. She sleeps with a knife sheath hung over the bedpost. She has two scars on her stomach that only show when she is helping Lila pick apples, when she lifts both arms to pull down a heavy bough.

(The scar near her left hip comes from a bullet, which Lila knows because Daddy has something similar above his right knee. 

The other one is thin and straight and travels just below her belly button. It looks kind of like a scar Mommy has, where the doctors needed to cut her open and take Lila out, but this cannot be right because Auntie Nat has no children.)

Auntie Nat likes dangling wire earrings made from Lila’s jewelry kit, coffee sweetened with fresh cream from Lila’s dairy cow, tiaras made from the blue chicory flowers in Lila’s back yard, and Lila herself in a more general sense. She will always read a picture book aloud when Lila asks her to, even if they’ve read it twenty billion times before and know all the words. She does the voices just right.

_(“Then one day Beauty looked upon the Beast, who was truly kind and gentle in spite of everything, and ceased to be afraid.”)_

And they call her the Black Widow, Daddy says.

This is a name someone gave her years ago: a name intended to make people think of gleaming silk webs, and portentous red hourglasses, and a badness that must be kept hidden away where it cannot hurt anybody else.  Whatever Bad Things Auntie Nat has done – which have not made her a Bad Person, because after all she did not choose the name– are probably always carried deep inside her, just like that.

So when Lila looks at all the film clips on television, after what happens in New York City, and discovers how the Incredible Hulk is just a tired-looking man whose clothes don’t fit, she is not inordinately surprised.

“Yeah,” Lila insists, “but what’s his real name? Doesn’t he have one?”

“It’s in the caption.” Auntie Nat rotates the newspaper with its big front-page color picture, pulling it out from beneath her own elbow. Lila scrapes her chair closer. “Come on, sound it out for me. The final silent ‘e’ always makes the other vowel long, remember.”

“Br…Br…” she squints. “Br-yoo-suh? Br-oo-suh? Bann-er?” 

“Right. Bruce Banner.” They stick more blackberries from the bowl onto their fingertips, and eat them one by one, so Auntie Nat has to speak between full cheeks. “Don’t forget the suffix, though. The ‘Dr.’ here? That means he’s ‘Doctor Bruce Banner.’”

“You mean like a doctor who gives people shots?” Lila drains her milk glass and regards Doctor Bruce Banner’s photograph with heightened suspicion. “That kind of doctor?”

Auntie Nat picks up a butter knife and begins twirling it through her fingers. She handles everything in this manner, with the deft articulation of an actor moving props around in a murder mystery play. Daddy says it gives people the heebie-jeebies.

“No, he’s a scientist. He helps people the way a doctor does, though. He became the Hulk because he was trying to learn more about the world and make it safer.” She taps the knife-point once against her teeth. “He’s very smart.”

“As smart as you?”

“Hmm.” Auntie Nat screws one eye shut, as though she drawing a bead on her target. “Almost. We’ll be charitable.”

Through an open window, Lila can see the hayfields bowed over by a heavy morning dew, spotted here and there with black-eyed-susans and Queen Anne’s lace in big white flakes. A bucket full of table scraps for the chicken coop sits waiting by the screen door. Damp grass still sticks to Lila’s bare feet, as it does to Auntie Nat’s, from going out at dawn to pick blackberries along the fence before any birds could get to them. Nobody else in the farmhouse is awake yet.

(Daddy has nightmares now, sometimes. He will begin shouting, or talking to himself, or he will get up and take his bow out onto the front porch and sit there without waking up at all. Lila will lie in bed listening until he falls asleep again.

_“Clint, it’s okay,”_  Mommy will say.  _“You’re here now, it’s okay.”_

That’s part of why Auntie Nat is visiting now: to be sure Daddy and Mommy are both okay.)

Auntie Nat has also promised they will go out behind the barn, later, to the mown grass strip where Daddy shoots arrows, and practice Lila’s kicks and punches – she keeps sticking her thumb inside her fist, Auntie Nat says, which will hurt Lila more than it hurts whoever she’s hitting.

Auntie Nat’s picture is in the newspaper too. She is standing next to Doctor Bruce Banner.

_(“ – to describe the shock and chaos of the scene. ‘He ran straight past me,’ said witness Rachel Johnson, who works on the thirty-fifth floor of Solutions Inc. ‘That huge thing would’ve come through the glass at us if he hadn’t. I thought we were all going to die! Now there’s a hole where the conference room used to be, but I can’t complain.’ Other sources told the Times that – ”)_

Lila inspects the man more closely. 

Cement dust lightens everyone’s hair, works into the creases of their faces, so that they all look as though they have aged twenty years. They pose outside a large stone building called Grand Central Station – the statue of a man with wings on his helmet, now missing an arm, stands astride its stopped clock.

Daddy, who hates getting his picture taken, leans back against the remains of a car. (He has tried to throw this newspaper out three times already, but Mommy hasn’t let him.) Iron Man carries his helmet under one arm. Thor raises his hammer in salutation. Captain America has turned himself so that the shield acts as a partition between his body and the camera lens. 

Auntie Nat stands with her feet apart, her shoulders set, a glowing golden staff gripped between her fists.

Doctor Bruce Banner is positioned at the frame’s far edge, holding himself in the stalled, balking posture of someone who has just realized he’s walked into the wrong room. Thick, defenseless curls stick up from his head at odd angles. The shirt seems two sizes too large for him. His feet are bare.  

But he is smiling, close-lipped and cautious, and he has one hand laid very lightly on Auntie Nat’s shoulder – not as though he doesn’t want to touch her, but as though he cannot be sure what will happen if he does.

“How does he change himself into the Hulk when he wants to?”

Auntie Nat has gotten up to pour another cup of coffee from where it hisses inside the percolator. She sits back down, folding one leg up beneath herself.

“Well, that’s kind of a tough question. He doesn’t always want to.” Now she pulls the newspaper back, lays a finger over her own name. “Sometimes the Hulk wants him to change, instead, so Doctor Banner has to keep him in control and be sure nobody gets hurt.”

“But the Hulk is always inside him?”

“Yes.”

Lila imagines the thing she has seen on television. She sees it huge and roaring, arms the size of tree trunks, raging and powerful and like nothing else that exists in the world. She tries to imagine holding that anger within her body, tries to imagine this soft-faced man in the newspaper accomplishing such a task every second of every day: a man who must carry all his Bad Things inside, too, and keep them there.

(Did Doctor Banner choose to call himself ‘The Hulk,’ or did somebody else pick that name for him? If she ever meets him, Lila decides to ask. 

As a scientist, he might also be able to tell her if there’s any way to acquire butterfly-related superpowers.)

Then she pictures the black widow spider web again, its woven threads glinting in and out of existence with the changing light; the game of cat’s cradle, she remembers, needs at least two people to play. The web is transferred from one pair of hands to another, and then traded back again, as you each work to untangle and uncross and reshape and release whatever strings bind the other person’s fingers together.

“Doctor Banner must be pretty brave, then,” Lila says. “Isn’t he?”

“Yep.” One corner of Auntie Nat’s mouth puckers into a smile. “He is.”

“Just like you?”

“That’s right.” 

And something funny happens to Auntie Nat, here. 

She glances away through the window – maybe at the sun, rising clear and white against a silver-pink sky – and does not look back at Lila again for a moment.

“Okay, let’s get everything cleaned up.” She reaches over to tug very gently on one of Lila’s pigtails. “You think those crabby hens of yours have any eggs for us?”

(Therefore Lila can say, with confidence, how she realized what was going to happen between Auntie Nat and Uncle Bruce before anybody else – although she can never quite decide which one of them is meant to be the Beauty, and which one is meant to be the Beast.

But that might be the whole point.)

…


End file.
